Ask HN: How do you do quick and painless API integrations?

I always dislike doing integration with 3rd party APIs. Other than Stripe, the documentation is almost always terrible. It's not tailored to my language, there's too many links to other things I don't need to know in the beginning, and asks me to make choices on things I don't know anything about yet. Then, I have to pick from a variety of client libraries, some of questionable quality, because the service couldn't be bothered to maintain an official lib (I'm not using esoteric langs), and then authentication is always a pain. That's all before I get to the good stuff of just getting to play the data. And that's when I actually care about getting to use the API. Other times, I just want it over and done with, because it's not the core of the product, and I feel like integration is just this long slog and chore. Does anyone else feel this way? How do you deal with getting through integration quickly or painlessly?